Anything become of this?
I have the same problem. If they aren't playing ball for a cosmetically fine laptop then I don't stand a chance because mine has a dent on the bottom. That isn't when the ring happened though!
It doesn't make sense that these should be so fragile to "pressure"
It took two weeks (in part because the very helpful senior consultant who took my case works only part time while he is in school) and a lot of careful explaining but in the end a very very helpful customer service representative and a senior consultant authorized a repair under Apple Care. It seems that the stores must see much more of this particular problem that the Apple Care people, which makes sense if you think about it: I called Apple Care, they asked me to take it into a store, I took it in, and in each instance I was told: pressure, not covered by Apple Care. If I had just left it at that, Apple Care people would never have seen or heard more about it. But for the reasons discussed above, I couldn't leave it there. Not with a nearly 2000 dollar machine nine months old without any visible damage and no (honest!) damage that I know of that didn't leave a mark.
I made clear, in a calm but steadfast way, that I wasn't trying to put one over on them. I could not believe I would be responsible for damage that seemed to come out of nowhere. And in the end I am not at all clear that the category of defect they call "pressure" in the stores is considered by Apple to be "damage" caused by misuse or "normal wear and tear" that is not covered by the warranty.
They kept asking me to email them photographs. But I am a writer not a photographer, and though you can't miss the white ring -- I am looking at half of it right now -- when you are looking at any light background my photographs of a bright screen were really hard to interpret if you hadn't seen the ring before.
At any rate, my advice to all: stay calm, but be persistent, and if you aren't satisfied with the consultants verdicts ask to speak to customer service. They are really there to keep customers satisfied, and my guess is that over the years they get good at separating the honest customers from the cranks and crooks. The honest customer probably get satisfaction--and I emphasized that I was an Apple Care true believer because of a decade of remarkable customer care.
For example: last summer, my son, about to begin his fourth year of college, was having trouble with the network card on his 2 year and 10 month old white Macbook. He went it in. They replaced the network card, the optical drive, the hard drive, and the bottom part of the case, which includes the keyboard. I have no idea why. No idea. Perhaps at the rate that kids and other people replace these things and the models change they have lots and lots of spare parts. So I am a big believer in Apple Care, and though this instance was a little more frustrating than any before, in the end it too helps explain why.